A USER'S GUIDE TO DEMOCRACY

An easily digestible, illustrated guidebook to the agencies and institutions that make up the federal government.

Fans of the old Schoolhouse Rock! song “I’m Just a Bill” (“and I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill”) will appreciate the straightforward approach that Civics 101 podcast co-hosts Capodice and McCarthy bring to the job of describing “how America works.” At the top of their discussion is the doctrine that each of the three branches of government is coequal, enshrining a system of checks and balances that emerged from James Madison’s Federalist essay urging that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” If that system is more observed in the breach than the act these days, it’s because the legislature has not asserted itself sufficiently. That said, the authors write, “the House can be a wild and crazy place,” subject to political movements like the tea party that shake things up periodically, while the Senate is less exuberant and more aloof, its members protected by six-year terms that were put in place, one supposes, to keep them above the fray. The Senate, write Capodice and McCarthy, was “created for debate,” with Senators able to talk for as long as they wish about any given bill—“or any other matter.” Both sides of Congress are inefficient, but that’s a feature and not a bug, meant to keep laws from spilling out of the Capitol dome too haphazardly. There are scarcely any qualifications for becoming president, either, apart from age and citizenship. The authors try for nonpartisanship, but it’s clear enough that they’re unimpressed with the current occupant of the White House: “There are a whole lotta firsts in the Trump administration,” they write, “but here’s the one we’re going with: He is the first president since Polk to not have a pet.”

Just the thing for students of civics—which, these days, should include the entire polity.